B Reactor at Hanford proposed as national historic landmark

RICHLAND – A reactor built for make fuel for atomic bombs at the dawn of the nuclear age in World War II has been nominated as a national historic landmark.

The proposal for the long-closed B Reactor at the Hanford nuclear reservation was developed by the National Park Service in collaboration with the Energy Department, which runs the sprawling complex that once produced fuel for nuclear weapons, and with boosters who hope to make the reactor into a museum.

Construction began at a breakneck pace with 45,000 workers in the Eastern Washington scablands in 1943, and it produced the fuel for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, shortly before the end of the war.

Its design remained the standard for U.S. reactors until a new plant began operating at the Savannah River complex in South Carolina in 1952. Five reactors based on the B Reactor design were built at Hanford from 1947 to 1955, and it continued to produce plutonium until 1968.

"The B Reactor provides a tangible link to world-changing events of the final years of World War II and the initial years of the Cold War," local historian Michele Gerber, and Brian Casserly, a University of Washington doctoral candidate, wrote in the nominating papers.

A key issue in deciding the fate of the reactor by the Columbia River will be how much of its historical integrity remains.

All of the support buildings have been removed in cleanup work at Hanford, the nation's most polluted nuclear site. T Plant, where plutonium was removed from fuel that had been irradiated in the B Reactor, remains in use for other work.

Would the B Reactor alone be enough?

"We think it is," said Stephanie Toothman, the park service's regional chief of cultural resource programs.

Landmark designation would add "another level of protection" because any action that could affect the integrity of the reactor would first have to be discussed with her agency, Toothman said.

Otherwise, B Reactor would be torn down to little more than its radioactive core and sealed, a process called "cocooning," so radiation can subside for 75 years before more cleanup plans are drafted. That process has been completed or is planned for eight other plutonium production reactors along the river at Hanford.

For now, Energy Department officials have agreed to delay release of the reactor to a cleanup contractor until 2009.

The nomination could be considered by the National Historic Landmark Subcommittee of the National Park System Advisory Board as early as April. A final decision is up to the secretary of the interior.

B Reactor, completed in 13 months, was designed to be 500 million times more powerful than the first reactor to achieve a chain reaction two years earlier at the University of Chicago.

So vital was the top-secret project, historians say, that construction workers caught drunk were jailed overnight to dry out and released the next day to return to work without facing charges.

The massive cast iron base of the reactor had to be machined to within .003 inch.

"The building conveys the extraordinary workmanship of only the most skilled workers specially recruited and vetted for exceptional expertise," Gerber and Casserly wrote.

"The creation of plutonium at B Reactor was both an ending and a beginning," they added. "It represented the first practical application of ... research to a production-scale nuclear reactor and produced one of the weapons that helped end World War II."